Buy EVE Online ISK News: When I started working with Internet routing, coming from a rigid corporate environment, I was surprised how little control you have over your traffic and how flaky the Internet really is. I have read in books about all the bells and whistles of traffic engineering but I've never seen the real application until I met BGP and the Internet. As many of you know, the Internet started out as few universities talking to each other. BGP (Border Gateway protocol) is the main building block of the Internet. The Internet is built up by BGP speaking peers (routers). Each origin (like CCP) has a network slice and we announce our network to our neighbors and hope they announce them to other neighbors. We rely on our next hop (upstream) neighbors to accept our prefix and carry the EVE traffic.

The major EVE Online problem with the Internet is that BGP is not very deterministic; it relies heavily on something called an AS-PATH. Each entity on the Internet has an AS number (autonomous system). The path from client to CCP is usually the AS of client ISP, Tier1 SP (top of the Internet), CCP. There will often be other upstream providers of the client ISP. What is the problem here? Within one AS there could be 10 router hops (as seen via traceroute) Those hops could go to Europe, the US and then back to Europe. The best part is that there is a lot of meddling with the best paths. Some ISP's will have a good connection to some Tier1 providers, but may also have a cheaper connection with some lousy provider that they engineer the traffic to EVE Online.

One example of this problem is Vodafone in Iceland. They peer with a large transit network called Cogent and then with T-systems (Deutche Telecom) in Europe. We don't peer with any of them. The shortest path from CCP to Vodafone Iceland is CCP-Telia-Cogent-Vodafone Iceland. The AS path, then, is two hops. The problem with this is that Cogent chooses to send all traffic to US and then over to Iceland via Vodafone. This is one AS hop. What we must then do is to manually engineer the traffic to use a longer path through our multi-homed connection in Telecity to get to Tiscali, who peer with T-systems, and then we reach Vodafone using the shortest real distance.

This article is from www.eveonline.com .

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